How did Creditsafe Cut Costs and Reduce Risk with an Enterprise Data Catalog?

Want to hear how one of the world’s biggest suppliers of credit reports uses a data catalog to their strategic advantage? Here’s a quick snapshot below (or click here if you would rather watch a short video ).

Creditsafe is the world’s most used supplier of company credit reports with over 200,000 subscription customers worldwide, operating in 16 international offices across 12 countries on 3 continents.

To expedite their growth, they allowed each new country that came online to manage their own acquisition of data with little input from the central organization. At first, since data regulations differed by country, this strategy made sense. But over time, Creditsafe began to get requests from local clients that wanted access to global data. They also faced the challenge of keeping up with real time changes (e.g., a court case settles and affects a credit rating) by incorporating new data quickly, while avoiding errors that could drive down customer confidence. Creditsafe had some aggressive business goals to meet and wanted to make their data as accurate and reliable as they could for their clients, augmenting weak country data with predictive scores from other countries.

Additionally, the European Union began to emphasize data protection rights for individuals under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires careful data governance to avoid hefty penalties. As their organisation was growing rapidly, Creditsafe found they needed local domain knowledge to handle the data, which led to a significant recruitment drive within the company and also the incorporation of a data catalog.

With Waterline, Creditsafe created a centralized, searchable data catalog of all data sources, based on the Waterline Smart Data Catalog. Critical to the deployment was the ability to automate data profiling and data tagging. The same kind of data required consistent naming and categorization across country borders. Automation was also critical for the onboarding of new data sources to increase accuracy of credit scoring as well as accelerating their ability to bring new countries, and therefore new revenue sources, online much more quickly than in the past. Ultimately, Creditsafe’s use of the Waterline Smart Data Catalog enabled data self-service. Users can now find and use data securely without having to always go to IT to find the data they are need to do their jobs.

The business impact?

The implementation of the Waterline Smart Data Catalog has affected Creditsafe’s business across a variety of categories:

Time Savings: Bringing new data sources online used to take months of manual labor. Now that effort takes days, with much of the process automated by the Waterline Smart Data Catalog discovery and tagging capabilities.

Cost Savings: Using Waterline, Creditsafe is able to identify duplicate data, which enables them to negotiate with suppliers and reduce data costs by only paying for data once.

Governance and GDPR. Creditsafe can now track the lineage of data and files back to the supplier as well as tag the location of sensitive data, making it much easier to comply with new regulations and respond to evolving requests from regulators.